My son Lee and his partner Debbie recently enjoyed a short holiday in Cyprus, an island which they have visited several times now. Whilst having a meal at a local restaurant they fell into conversation with the Cypriot owner and two waitresses. In the event they stayed most of the evening, exchanging experiences and listening to the life stories of their hosts, the two ladies being from Moldova. Lee and Debbie told about Britain and their lives back home and undertook to send photographs of their local area of East Anglia.
On their return home they went about the business of collecting photographic images and were then faced with the daunting task of adding captions in a language which the ladies could read, namely Russian. Having, unsurprisingly, no inkling of this language between them, Lee decided to use an on-line, automated translator to translate English to Russian and then back again and to judge if the end result returned to vaguely recognisable English. He decided that this was an acceptable, if less than perfect solution to the problem. However, the thing that amused him was when he needed to add a caption to a picture of a clock-tower in Downham Market. He put in the phrase ‘clock-tower’ to be translated into Russian and the resulting Russian phrase to be translated into English. The English phrase produced at the end of this process was ‘tower of hours’. Nice!